Thursday 18 February 2016

Wednesday 17 February 2016

Odour Issues Update, and an Entry for the Bristol Short Story Prize

Odour Issues is almost at its halfway point - 45,000 words and the middle of the twelfth chapter of an envisaged 24 + prologue + possible epilogue. I'm hoping to finish it before Autumn. Then I'll start work on my Canto collection. To this end, I've started reading - and in many cases re-reading - Pound's Cantos. I have also read the first Canto of Byron's Don Juan - not quite sure how this is going to serve my purposes, but it's been fun.

I've left off writing Odour Issues for about ten days in order to write an entry for the annual Bristol Short Story Prize. My story is called The Inanity of the Deed, and consists in a loose adaptation of Conrad's novel The Secret Agent as a retelling of one of the petty outrages which Bristol's somewhat footling community of sixth form Kropotkin-readers sporadically inflicts upon our City.

I found this hilarious Swiftian Modest Proposal on Twitter this morning, courtesy of someone calling him/herself Northern Variant

As a Labour MP, I'm often chased down the road by very vocal Labour supporters. I welcome this level of passionate engagement. It's ...